Revisiting Transit-Oriented Development Evaluation for Urban Master Plans in the Context of Developing Countries

Transit-oriented development (TOD) advocates sustainable development and the building of livable neighborhoods. Several measures are proposed to evaluate TOD principles; however, the suitability of these measures is not fully explored in the context of developing countries. This paper provides a systematic method for multivariate analysis of TOD measures in the context of developing countries. A bivariate analysis is conducted to simultaneously study all TOD measures against the distance to transit measure because of its essential role in TOD. A dynamic zoning system is introduced to capture a realistic reflection of neighborhood that is walkable for its residents. In the proposed zoning system, neighboring zones can overlap, as the walkable areas for the nearby residences may overlap. The adherence of Tehran’s Master Plan to TOD principles is examined with a focus on TOD measures and multidimensionality in assessment. The results highlight the curse and the blessing of the high-density urban sprawl in sustainable development.

On New Ideas for Design of Road Infrastructure: Hybrid Fatigue Analyses

To increase the pace of the design of safer road infrastructure and raise the active and passive safety features of road structures on the global stage, innovative and smart virtual tools are essential. One of the basic steps for such ground breaking numerical simulation technology would be to develop advanced smart hybrid techniques with dynamic adaptation into mainstream design and simulation tools that are used by engineering offices. In the research work herein, a new numerical framework including dynamic zoning, advanced grid interfacing, new computationally-efficient solvers, and genetic algorithm symbolic-regression has briefly been presented to address long-standing problems of speed, accuracy, and reliability of numerical tools. The fundamental physical and mathematical aspects of the new simulation framework are concisely presented. In addition, some outcomes of real-world case studies utilized using the proposed hybrid analytical and data-driven (i.e., machine learning, ML) scheme have been shown, where the design rule for road gantry structures is interrogated using the developed virtual tool. One of the main contributions of this paper is to show the benefits of using hybrid simulation technologies to model engineering systems along with the ML-based method to optimize their designs.

Handwritten digit recognition using neural networks and dynamic zoning with stroke-based descriptors

This article presents an Off-line handwritten digit recognition approach based on neural networks. We define a numeric character as a composition of vertical and horizontal strokes. After the preprocessing, we use dynamic zoning to retrieve the positions where vertical strokes – the main strokes — are joined to horizontal strokes. These features are recorded into a representative string and verified using a custom matching pattern. Finally, a multilayer perceptron neural network is fed with the previous data to raise the learning process. The results gathered from the experiments performed on the well-known MNIST handwritten database are compared against other proposals providing promising results.